The Biggest Flip-Flop of the Campaign?

Donald Trump's been admitting lately to losing to Joe Biden in 2020, and few seem to care or even notice.

Bernie Goldberg put out a good piece on Monday in which he asked, “Who the heck is Kamala Harris?”

It’s a good question, Bernie argued, because the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee we see today is a far cry, at least rhetorically, from the hyper-progressive long-shot candidate we saw four years ago. In the relatively short amount of time since taking the reins from President Biden and his failed reelection candidacy, Harris has flip-flopped on position after position, mostly moderating her views. And she has yet to offer an explanation for her profound evolution that actually makes sense.

Bernie suggests that tonight’s debate “might finally help us understand who this person is who went, in the blink of an eye, from being widely viewed as a political liability to becoming her party’s nominee for president — without winning a single vote in any primary.”

Now, the truth is that it’s not exactly a mystery what happened, and we already sort of know what kind of person Harris is. She’s the kind of person who, upon her campaign recognizing that a bunch of her old radical positions (like banning fracking and Medicare for all) won’t fly in this year’s general election, would bury those positions six feet deep while insultingly maintaining that her “values have not changed.”

Harris wants to win the presidency, so she’s saying whatever she thinks she needs to in order to make it happen (record be damned).

But that, of course, is not the explanation Harris has given. She hasn’t given any explanation. Thus, debate moderators and others in the media have an absolute responsibility to press her hard to get one on the record. I hope we see that tonight.

But Harris, in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t the only flip-flopper in this race. Donald Trump has reversed a number of his positions as well, including on abortion, TikTok, marijuana laws, and Obamacare (which he now wants to expand rather than repeal). As with Harris, he should be called on to explain why.

One particular flip-flop from Trump, that I’m shocked hasn’t received more attention, is his repeated admission over the past few weeks that he, in fact, lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. This should be a blockbuster story considering the immeasurable damage the Big Lie has caused to our country, but I’m guessing many of you are just now hearing about it for the first time.

If you’re one of those people, let me catch you up to speed (emphasis mine):

The other day, Trump told podcaster Lex Fridman, “I became president, and then the second time, I got millions more votes than he got the first time. I was told that if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win. You can’t not win. And I got millions of more votes than that. And I lost by a whisker.”

“[Biden] beat us by a whisker,” he said at a Moms for Liberty summit just days earlier, after again citing his vote totals. He did add the qualifier that Biden’s team “used COVID to cheat,” but that appeared to be a reference to Biden’s famous “basement campaign” that kept him out of the public eye, and/or some states moving to mail ballots to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus. That’s a far different accusation than Trump’s years-long insistence that he actually won the necessary number of votes, but that they were fraudulently stolen from him.

Days earlier, Trump said at a press conference at the southern border, “I got many millions more votes than I got the first time, but didn’t quite make it, just a little bit short.”

Lost by a whisker. Beat by a whisker. Just a little bit short. This is new ground.

As we learned through sworn testimony collected by the January 6 committee, Trump had previously admitted to losing, but it was done in private. (Unsurprisingly, that testimony, from multiple former Trump administration aides, was labeled “fake news” and “perjury” by GOP leaders, right-wing grifters, and true believers.)

But with Trump now cavalierly copping to his loss right out in the open, and seemingly making a conscious effort to distance himself from the election denialism that defined not only his last few months in office, but also much of his post-presidency, it would be journalistic malpractice to treat this development as little more than a political footnote.

After all, Trump’s “stolen election” hoax was an extraordinarily consequential lie that stabbed at the very fabric of U.S. democracy. For millions of Americans, it destroyed institutional faith in our free and fair elections. It caused an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that ended lives and careers, sent hundreds to the hospital, put many people in prison, and denied our country of its peaceful transfer of power. It led to countless election officials living in fear, and still, to this day, being targeted with death threats. It has cost the GOP all kinds of political seats, including two U.S. Senate majorities, and has purged from the party nearly every political leader unwilling to promote or at least entertain the lie. It has cost right-wing media outlets and other “stop the steal” players hundreds of millions of dollars in defamation lawsuits. And some might even argue that without a majority of Republican voters falsely believing that Trump won four years ago, he wouldn’t have been given a second chance to lose to the Democrats this time around.

So yeah, while Kamala Harris absolutely needs to answer for her stark political makeover, so does Trump, who has committed perhaps the biggest flip-flop of the campaign.

Let’s see if that happens at tonight’s debate.